NEWS OF THE WEIRD

Ironies

Ironies

January 13, 2008

In interviews with reporters from McClatchy Newspapers, cemetery workers in Najaf, Iraq, lamented the recent downturn in violence in that city, as they admitted having grown accustomed to the income from the estimated 6,500 caskets a month that they serviced. (The number had fallen to less than 4,000 a month, and others dependent on the death industry around Najaf were said to be similarly suffering.)

Following an 18-month investigation, the Texas State Library and Archives Commission concluded that the state government requires too many reports (a total of more than 1,600). About one-fourth of them either were duplicative of others or were still required even though the receiving agency no longer exists or are dutifully prepared year after year even though it is evident that they go unread. The commission issued its findings in a 668-page report.

Tajuan Bullock, 33, was allegedly caught in the act of burglarizing a home in Montgomery, Ala., and, while the resident held him at gunpoint for police, he made Bullock clean up the big mess he had made when he was rummaging for valuables.

Police in Bakersfield, Calif., came to the aid of a man and a woman at the bottom of the Panorama Bluffs near town and told reporters later that the man had attempted to toss his girlfriend over the cliff but that she grabbed him, and the pair tumbled down 300 feet together (and that he was hurt worse than she). Compelling explanations

Hawaiian Airlines is suing Mesa Air Group on a business matter and believes Mesa's chief financial officer, Peter Murnane, has, or had, documents relevant to the lawsuit on his office computer but that, recently, conveniently, the documents had been deleted. Mesa acknowledged in a court filing that Murnane had indeed recently erased a huge number of files from his office computer, but said he was merely deleting his massive collection of pornography.

Monsignor Tommaso Stenico, an official with the Vatican's Congregation for the Clergy, was suspended when he was recognized in a hidden-camera TV documentary about gay priests. However, he told the La Repubblica newspaper in Rome a few days later that he is not gay, but was only pretending to make sexual advances to a man in order to gain the trust of “those who damage the image of the Church with homosexual activity.” Great outdoors - Texas style

Entomologists found a spider web in a state park about 45 miles east of Dallas, covering trees, shrubs and the ground along a 200-yard stretch. The originally white web had turned brownish because “millions” of mosquitoes had been trapped in it.

Wildlife experts tried to assure the public that the jellylike blobs (“millions of tiny organisms known as zooids,” wrote The Dallas Morning News) attached to trees and dock pilings along Grapevine Lake between Dallas and Fort Worth were harmless.

The latest sighting of the legendary “chupacabra” (the mythical hairless, blood-sucking goat), near Cuero, Texas, was determined in November to be that of a dead coyote. Least competent folks The Providence (R.I.) Journal, reporting on a campaign by the area's legal immigrants last summer to apply for citizenship, selected Juan Garcia, 54, as typical of the community. Garcia said he decided to apply after being encouraged by this year's immigration-reform debate, adding that he had been in the United States legally since 1978, with permanent-resident status since 1985. According to the Journal, however, Garcia explained all of that “through a translator.” The poor dear! A federal magistrate in Tampa, Fla., ordered a doctor's appointment for the incarcerated Brian Wilcox, who is being detained on several child pornography charges, after he complained that he was suffering from a series of medical problems. He said that his back hurt from a four-year-old injury; that he has problems with his eyes; that his feet and groin area are numb as if they are “asleep”; that there is a bulge on the left side of his groin; that he is worried about a mole on his nose because of his family history of cancer; that all of his remaining 16 teeth are either decaying or cracking (keeping him from eating, and he's lost 40 pounds); and that he has “severe flatulence at all times.”